Install Wizard 'Looks Too Complicated'

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Conrad Knauer <atheoi at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> If the user is connected to the internet, might it be possible to
> guess their physical location (e.g. for time zone) by IP address?
> (http://www.tracemyip.org/ seems to be able to :) as most people will
> want to install their systems where they are going to use them.

Even better is if we could determine the correct mirror. E.g. I use
iinet, and traffic to the ftp.iinet.net.au mirror is free, so I always
set the mirror to iinet so I don't have hundreds of megabytes taken
from my quota.

In general, it would be best if Ubuntu automatically picked a mirror
in the users freezone (if one exists).

(1) We could use the IP address to detect if we are inside the iinet
freezone.  There are a lot of IP ranges owned by iinet (as they have
quite a number of these, see e.g.:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/704521.html,
which mentions the possibility of using a BGP feed to keep up to
date).

(2) We could use traceroute. E.g. I get
 2  nexthop.wa.iinet.net.au (203.59.14.16)  18.911 ms  24.903 ms  25.088 ms
So if nexthop.*.iinet.net.au appears in the traceroute this may
indicate the we should use the iinet mirror

(3) Ping is *not* useful in the case. The ping to the Australian
ubuntu mirror is a fifth of the ping to the iinet mirror, but this is
a small "price" to pay for being in the iinet freezone.
64 bytes from mirror.aarnet.edu.au (202.158.214.106): icmp_seq=1
ttl=56 time=86.7 ms
PING ftp.iinet.net.ua (195.39.196.131) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hold.iname.ua (195.39.196.131): icmp_seq=1 ttl=43 time=473 ms

> For the partitioning step, if there is another OS present, the default
> option should be to install along side it; if none, use the whole
> disk.  Partitioning is always a scary step, so that should be
> generally hidden.

The one thing I find more scary than partitioning is the idea of
partitioning happening without warning. I guess they will get warning
when they reach the "review and install" button.

> A look at the pics on
> http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2009/10/02/ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala-beta-reviewed-screenshots/
> suggests:
>
> Step 5 (user name, password, computer name) should be the first step
> and really the only things that a user should need to fill in...
> unless there's already an OS on the system that Ubuntu can extract a
> u/n from :)

There are also algorithms for extracting the password from XP as well...

...
> The bottom of the page should then have a [Review and Install] button
> leading to what is now Step 6 which will spell out the changes and
> then an [Install] button at the bottom of that.

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted